There’s a certain kind of person who gets bothered by physics. Bothered by information theory. Because to them intelligence is a protected thing - it belongs to the world of ghosts. So what exactly is this blessed intelligence, and behind intelligence, consciousness too? What are we even talking about?
You already delegated half your work to a machine
How can you say that machines don’t understand, that they don’t really comprehend, when you’ve just handed them half of your job? What are you talking about?
You can talk to a machine about any subject. You give it your documents and it puts them together for you. It even helps you understand them - because you didn’t understand them yourself in the first place, so you asked it to help you. How do you deny that there’s comprehension in these systems? How do you deny that they master language in a way that should give you a serious dose of humility, if you think you’re smarter than one of these high-end language models?
They are much more intelligent than you.
And then there’s the truly ridiculous move: people use language models to answer YouTube comments. Backed into a corner on the mind-body problem, on the fact that they don’t even have a definition of intelligence, they let the language model write their reply - and yet they refuse to grant that same model any intelligence.
Where is all this human intelligence, exactly?
There’s this whole crusade to defend human intelligence. But where is it? Do we really want to talk about how intelligent the average person is?
“Machines have no morality, no intuition, no creativity.” Fine - but why is the average guy, the one spending his days at the betting shop or ticking a random box on a ballot, supposedly intelligent? Where is all this intelligence in the average human being?
Most people are driven by instinct. Their reasoning capacity is infinitely lower than these machines’. What are we even talking about? Where is this supposed supremacy of human intelligence?
The Catholic roots of dualism
And then there’s always this mind-body dualism - of Catholic derivation - that says intelligence and consciousness can’t live in a physical thing, that there has to be something more. And what is that something? Ghosts. Emergentism.
Emergentism, as an explanation, works like this: to make a pizza you put flour, water, yeast, and mozzarella in the oven, and the pizza emerges. Emergentism means you haven’t yet understood what you’re talking about. It’s a way of hedging your bets and saying: “I’ve figured out what the ingredients are, I just haven’t figured out how they interact.”
Or you get the people who insist these qualities live in the quantum mechanics of the microtubule - and then, on top of that, in the divine providence of the Lord who grants us intelligence.
This dualist stuff has Catholic roots. It sees the body as something wrong, so we have to separate intelligence, our psychological capacities, all our mental qualities, from the body - because the mind is supposedly something other than the brain.
Well, no.
The mind is the brain. The brain is the only thing there is. You are your brain and you are your body. There’s nothing else - so enjoy your life.
Born wrong, and the guilt that comes with it
Speaking of those Catholic roots: the body is treated as a mistake, and the message they hand you is that you’re born wrong, born with a sense of guilt. Your body is wrong. Live your life the way we tell you to, because at some point you’ll go to heaven and be rewarded for your good deeds.
What gets me most about these comments is that there are people more willing to believe in a guy with a beard up in the sky who created everything, who watches you and decides whether you behaved well or badly - more willing to believe that than to believe that intelligence is a thing of this world. That it belongs to us just as it belongs to machines. That it’s a byproduct of a selection that unfolded over centuries of biological mechanisms.
We are machines too - beautiful ones. Saying we’re machines is not a put-down. Machines are beautiful.
So we’d rather bow to this cheap Catholic stuff - which by 2026 has honestly worn everyone out - than look at physics, at the Nobel prizes, at centuries of scientific progress.
We are biological machines, and that’s the beautiful part
The mind and the body are the same thing. Intelligence is something that can live in machines too, because we are machines - biological machines selected over time. There’s nothing special about us. So enjoy your life, because the special part of life is precisely that it’s finite, there’s only one of it, and there’s nothing else.
One last question for the defenders of human supremacy
I find this position absolutely ridiculous, and I want to ask something. These intellectuals - people of a certain standing who set themselves up as judges of intelligence in machines and defenders of human primacy - I like to ask them one thing.
These people who care so much about the human being: where are they when it’s time to defend the right to abortion? Where are they when it’s time to stop sending innocent kids off to fight old men’s wars? Where were these figures when it meant putting your face on the line and saying that certain wars are wrong? Where were these great defenders of human supremacy when it actually meant defending the innocent?
You’re a joke.